Posts Tagged history

Osprey’s book on fortifications in the Kingdom of Wessex is a well-done introduction, but didn’t quite dive into some detail I’d like. At the end, Lavelle admits that the book is even more limited in scope than it could be, but it does manage some interesting discussion.

There’s a good map of the known fortified locations from an administrative record known as the Burghal Hidage, and some discussion of the scholarly work on it. A bit more focused discussion of this (it gets spread out a little) would have been nice, and maybe a real breakdown of how many places are well known, how many the place is known, but the layout is questionable, and how many listed burhs are not identified.

But the real focus is on the more practical matters of considering some of the economy around them, and how these sites served as an actual defense of the area, including secondary (generally hilltop) sites, and signalling. There’s some good color illos of ‘typical’ fortifications, including the ‘generic’ burh on the cover, and there’s reconstructions of Winchester and Lydford shown.

I find myself wanting more with this book on almost everything. But at the same time, I don’t know that there’s much more to be done within the page count. Perhaps really focusing on one location and it’s layout would have helped.

The third volume of Shannon Appelcline’s history of the RPG industry maintains the same general format as before: about four hundred pages, separate chapters for each publisher, covering (essentially) a decade of time (1990-1999).

I tend to be fascinated by beginnings, and with 25 years since the first RPG when this book opens, the beginnings are over, leading to a slightly lower interest for me. Also, this is a time period where I wasn’t paying as much attention to RPGs, so there’s not a lot of personal connection. Reading through the ’10 things about the decade’ section in the back shows that maybe it was mutual. Trends in the ’90s angled away from my interests, which carried over into less interest in some company histories. Cyberpunk did well in the late ’80s, and urban fantasy did well throughout the ’90s, and they’re both genres that have never appealed to me.

But there’s still a lot of interest to me here. Most notably, part two of the book is a single chapter, a pattern that echoes TSR being the sole chapter of part one of the first book. In fact, it is called ‘The Other Half of the Story’, on the idea that the story of the RPG is still very much the story of D&D, and Wizards of the Coast is the other half of that. This was published in 2014, so actual end of 4th Edition D&D and the last few years of 5th are too recent to be covered, which is a shame (and great grist for a future update of this volume). Past that, AEG was interesting, as they kind of came out of left field on me with a few issues of Shadis being handed out for free at cons. The full stories of a few other companies I knew of (especially the train-wreck of Imperium Games) were very nice to see, though I found the history of Guardians of Order didn’t seem to dig in to what exactly happened to the company as much as I’d like.

There’s 21 company histories this time, plus four mini-histories, and a nice page on Ars Magica fanzines and how they helped keep that property going; an all too rare look at the fan side of the industry in these histories. There’s also a good section on early Swedish RPGs as the background to ’90s English-language publisher Metropolis. As much as I admire how wide-ranging these books generally are, it is a little annoying to not get any sense of what was going on outside the US, Canada and Britain (and I imagine far more than merely ‘annoying’ for anyone from outside those countries).

It’s another well-written book, and I doubt there’s any other wide-ranging source for RPGs in the ’90s, and so is recommended if you have any interest in that subject. I will note that the (necessarily) focused coverage on RPGs continues to hurt proper coverage of what exactly many of the companies were doing, but instead of the lack of wargame coverage, now it is the lack of CCG coverage that causes problems. However the overall CCG boom-and-bust cycle was so fast that what is given is sufficient in many, but not all, cases.

The second volume of Shannon Appelcline’s history of the RPG industry is every bit as large as the first. It’s a much bigger subject though, since the 1980s saw a lot of activity up and down. But TSR and GDW were very prominent parts of this decade, and were already covered in the first volume. This is also the decade of most of my role-playing activity, so there’s a lot of familiar names here, and many more I remember from ads, but never knew someone who actually got the products.

There’s another 23 major histories here, plus six ‘mini-histories’, and two magazine histories (these really need to be in the table of contents). This is about twice as many entries as the previous volume, which shows that most of them aren’t as long, though there’s still some very substantial chapters.

The biggest omission I noted in this volume was Car Wars. Appelcline passes over it quickly as a board game that Steve Jackson Games did very well with. However, it really exists in that halfway realm of the ‘proto-RPG’ or ‘hybrid game’ that he explores a little in the first volume. While the people in Car Wars are largely not the focus, there is a skill system, and there is character advancement through those skills. Moreover, the expected mode of play was for characters to persist from session to session. Sunday Drivers (expanded and reprinted from The Space Gamer, and later retitled Crash City) was labeled as ‘a role-playing supplement for Car Wars‘ and Convoy (reprinted from the first issue of Autoduel Quarterly) is a solo adventure (though not for one character) not unlike the ones produced for Tunnels & Trolls. Perhaps a large history of the RPG industry isn’t the place to meditate on just what constitutes an RPG, but I think looking at the edge cases, especially where play styles and fan groups start bleeding over into each other, is instructive.

While there’s several companies I’m very familiar with in here, they’re concentrated in the early parts of the book. In the last two (of six) parts, the company I’m most familiar with (DGP) I only really knew of after the fact, and I never got anything by New Infinities and only one from R. Talsorian (Dream Park, though I certainly enjoyed playing Teenagers From Outer Space). Again, it’s an extremely informative book that covers a lot of ground well.

The title of Palmer’s book is generally familiar, and he acknowledges directly that he’s writing a similar book to Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire in the introduction. However, this is a ’90s book for a more casual audience, and so isn’t anywhere near as long or as moralizing as Gibbon’s classic.

And… maybe a little moralizing would help. He does a good job describing a lot of the events of the Ottoman Empire’s slow breakup, but never really tries to posit any real reason why such a strong state should come apart, and why it took so much longer to do so than many outside observers assumed. A large part of this, is that you never get a good picture of the Empire as a whole, with the bulk of the attention being tied up with the person of the Sultan, and innermost circle of advisers and diplomats.

Palmer picks the failure of the second siege of Vienna (1683) as the starting point of his book, which seems to be a good one. I had not realized just how battered the Empire was in the next few years, with revolts in Greece, and various European powers picking up what they could. But like the Byzantine Empire before them, the Ottomans recover, and retake almost everything that was lost.

After a decent amount of detail in this section, coverage becomes light, but slowly picks up detail again, with the 19th Century (understandably) taking up a fair amount of the book. The various diplomatic maneuverings of Europe around the ‘sick man’ are covered in more and more detail as time passes. WWI itself isn’t as detailed, but the actual fighting of the war is not the primary focus. Instead, we get good broad accounts of the activity on the fronts, increasing Arab restlessness, and the maneuverings of the men at the top. The ‘post WWI’ struggles of Kemal, and the final fall of the Sultanate and Caliphate are handled in some detail.

It’s a very good introductory account of all these events, and probably at its strongest at the beginning and the end, which deal with subjects that don’t get enough coverage in histories. The real shortcoming is the lack of any kind of look at how it all came to be. There’s a good amount on the efforts to ‘Westernize’ (and to resist Westernizing) the Empire late in its life, but Palmer does little to show just how the Ottomans ended up with with a dysfunctional system that left them unable (or likely, unwilling) to adapt, and unable to impose its will within its own borders.

Shannon Appelcline’s Designer’s & Dragons is a truly massive undertaking: A history of the entire roleplaying game industry from its beginnings to about 2010. Just the first volume, covering six years (1974–79), is 400 pages.

However, the structure is such that he is covering a lot more than those six years. Each chapter is a complete history of a single company, running to when they closed down, and many of the companies here are still running in one form or another today (and certainly, none of them ended in the ’70s). This volume covers thirteen companies who had an impact on the RPG industry during the ’70s, plus three ‘mini-histories’ of more peripheral companies, and one ‘magazine history’ (annoyingly, these last do not show up in the table of contents).

This does fracture a lot of subjects, notably how the industry and market was evolving, and how one company’s releases were affecting the others. This is present, but because it bridges chapters, is not well served. And the the history of RPGs outside the companies is under-served. There is a nice bit of background on the Bay Area gaming scene (as the background of Arduin), but no similar coverage of the Los Angeles area, which was an important early center of RPG fandom (most surprising is that Alarums & Excursions doesn’t even rate a mini-history box, even if it is a completely amateur production). Appelcline keeps solidly focused on his general subject, only touching on non-RPG products from a company where they impinge on the company and its RPG side as a whole, making several of those chapters noticeably incomplete on their subject.

And… the book is still 400 pages with all those omissions, and only covers the first corner of the industry. I want more, but I have to admit my interests are further reaching than most, and I would really like to see a good history that tackles wargaming, and frankly also ‘adventure gaming’ in general. It breaks these six years into four parts, with TSR and the genesis of the form being part one (which is available as a very generous free trial here), part two covering the first four major companies to leap onto RPGs, part three consisting of wargame publishers who moved into RPGs in the early days (though GDW is rightfully part of part two), and the fourth talking about the rise of ‘universal’ (as in ‘for any game system’, even when you which which game they really mean…) publishers.

Several of these companies I kind of consider ‘childhood friends’ of mine, having grown up around products by GDW, Flying Buffalo, and of course, TSR. Others, like GW, are less familiar. It is a little depressing seeing just how many ways a company can run into financial trouble, but it is nice to find out just what happened to a fair number of people who, from my fairly limited viewpoint, just disappeared along the way. Finding out more about games I saw ads for, but never knew anyone who had a copy was also a plus. The book was entertaining and informative, with just a few small editing issues. And I’m already most of the way through devouring the second book.

Crowley’s book on the fall of Constantinople doesn’t disappoint. He leads off by giving a good overview of the rise of Islam, and various failed sieges of the city over the centuries, showing how it became something of a recurring ambition that was eventually absorbed by the Turks when they converted to Islam.

From there, the focus moves in to the decade or so before the siege, detailing Murat, and then Mehmet II, before giving Constantine XI’s background. The construction of the Throat-Cutter (an Ottoman castle built to cut Constantinople off from the Black Sea), and the final attempts to heal the Great Schism between Orthodox and Catholic rites are detailed before moving on to the siege itself.

Like Crowley’s Empires of the Sea, this is primarily a readable account of the siege, and not any sort of detailed analysis, but he does provide good information on walls of Constantinople, and just how they were outmoded by the coming of gunpowder and siege artillery. He also goes into the ability to take rubble and earth and create improvised fortifications that serve just as well (though perhaps being less imposing looking) while being much harder for artillery to deal with. The book also talks a bit about two weak points in the walls, which were particular targets for the siege. On the other hand, some details, such as the system of locked gates in the main wall, behind the forward wall where most of the siege was conducted, only come up when dramatically important, and not in the general description of how things were working (which, with a lighter book like this, are a bit lacking as extraneous technical detail anyway).

Crowley freely acknowledges that there’s a number of uncertainties that he cuts through to provide the best version he can. And that may be the best reason for keeping to a very readable format here. There’s enough contradictory legend here to weigh down a narrative so that the events are never seen through the maze of arguments. He does give several of the more prominent alternatives, and admits there’s really no reliable knowledge as to what happened to Constantine XI when the city fell.

It’s an act of hubris to be able to pronounce the ‘greatest’ anything, much less the ‘greatest’ knight, a class of people that was fairly large and existed over centuries, but it is certainly fair to say that William Marshal is the best known knight, and actually a good contender for the title on his own merits.

Long-lived and successful, Marshal rose from obscurity as a second son to being the regent of England in all but name. Even so, he’d hardly be known at all today if not for a biography of him written in the early Fourteenth Century, and rediscovered in the Nineteenth. This has been of great use in learning more of the Twelfth Century, but it does present the problems of a biased document (having been commissioned by his son). Asbridge has studied other records from the time, and used them to check some of the biography’s claims, which generally stand up to scrutiny. (There are a few things where the records show that something couldn’t have happened as described; but it’s generally a case of being off by a year or two, which is pretty good considering the author seemed to be going off of other people’s reminiscences.)

Ashbridge’s biography also serves as an introduction to the Twelfth Century as a whole. There are two layers of subchapters in the book (subchapters and sub-subchapters), and while some of them serve other purposes, many of the sub-subchapters are taking time out to take a look at an aspect of the time. He gives a description of how the system of household knights worked at the time, describes the general form of early tournaments (which was vastly different from the more familiar late- or really post-Medieval version). This points up that the book is meant for a fairly general audience, and some of these asides will be familiar to people who only have a moderate appreciation of the Middle Ages. But it makes for a much more well-rounded book than just a focused examination of Marshal himself, and is structured in such a way that it does not detract from the main focus.

However, the general-audience target of the book means that the only footnotes are basically long parenthetical asides or clarifications. There are no detailed notes of where information came from, and many cases of unsupported assertions interleaved with others that are taken apart and examined in some detail. For all of that, Marshal himself only dimly comes across as a person, as Asbridge seems to have trouble coming to any solid conclusions as to what he was like. Part of this seems to be an inability to believe that Marshal could really have been motivated by a deep-seated loyalty to a person, or perhaps, the crown of England itself (which is something that would likely have evolved over time). This shows up early, when he doesn’t even consider such a concept as an explanation as to why his father was apparently willing to blithely toss his younger son away when he was held as a hostage.

Keeping in mind the real audience though, this is a well-constructed book, and does a good job with many of secondary characters as well, for instance giving a more nuanced view of King John than he habitually gets.

Medieval Spain is one of those subjects I would like to know more about, so a used copy of Menocal’s book on al-Andalus was an attractive purchase for me. It’s a little more limited than I would like, being more about literary culture than anything else (though there is plenty of architecture, and other high cultural objects as well).

But the ‘how’ (as seen in the subtitle) is generally left out. There is some discussion of how tolerance was built into a lot of early Muslim culture, but nothing on the day-to-day functioning of that tolerance, and nothing really about how it broke down. Most notably, the book largely ends with the fall of Granada, and the promise of religious toleration which is broken mere months later. There’s no real look at the pressures that lead to this final violent end of tolerance.

In the meantime, we are treated to shapshots of what happened in Iberia over ~700 years, taking particular scenes and persons, and exploring them and what they did, and who they knew, what they wrote, and how it was written. Some very interesting things come to light this way. Menocal promotes the idea that languages only have (by custom) certain uses. A language may be so identified with religious uses, that it stops being a language of poetry or storytelling. She identifies Arabic as a language that was used for religion, and yet never lost its non-religious (and religiously prohibited) uses. Jews and Christians living in al-Andalus learned Arabic, and then transmitted this freedom into the post-Latin vernaculars and Hebrew, creating a flowering of literature in those languages. According to Ornament of the World, this is the start of the various Romance vernaculars being taken seriously, and the start of the popular songs that started the ‘courtly love’ tradition in Aquitaine, and I’d like to see a book that traces this in more detail.

It’s a decent book, and if you’re interested, I do recommend it, though I would like to see a more rigorous look at most of the subjects Menocal brings up.

William Manchester’s book is really an ode to his hero, Magellan. He’s not a bad hero to have, but I think Manchester gives him far too much credit. The real value however, is that Manchester is far more interested in establishing the world he lived in than examining the man. Considering how often it is difficult to get anyone willing to have the feel of a time period as their main subject, it raises the book a bit in my estimation.

However, ‘The Medieval Mind’ in the subtitle is an overstatement. There’s a brief establishment of his look at the medieval world at the start of the book, but most of it is really on the transition into the Renaissance. It’s well written, and tackles the subject fairly well, but there are problems. Most of the contemporary authors he quotes were probably doing so for moralizing purposes in the first place, and a lot of what is cited has a very distinct tone of ‘kids these days!’. So, the book paints a picture of a static society that was breaking down into license and abuse of power that is unlikely to be very accurate in either direction.

Its worth noting that he covers the earliest parts of the Reformation, and within limits, covers it better than Diarmaid MacCulloch’s large volume on the subject. He doesn’t go into the threads of intellectual thought that is the primary focus of the latter, but he covers the more temporal aspects of the early power struggle in a more readable, and I think, more complete, format.

The final section is on Magellan’s voyage, including a good grounding in what the original plan was, and where it went wrong: At the time, the Rio de Plata was known, and from its size, was assumed to be a passage to the Pacific, as it had been too large to explore thoroughly. It’s a very good summary of one of the great sea voyages of history.

In general, A World Lit Only by Fire is a good readable starting point for the history of the Renaissance, but a lot of nuance is decidedly not there. The general learned opinion is that his scholarship is too out date (I’ll note that Durant’s Story of Civilization looks to be the primary starting point of his opinions, which while great, is well over half a century old), though I don’t know of a more current ‘alternative’.

Alexandria is one of the great success stories of the ancient world, being founded by Alexander the Great, and then spending the next several centuries as one of the great trading ports of the Mediterranean, as well as a center of learning. So a history of the city has a lot of appeal.

Sadly, this isn’t really a history of the city. It does start with Alexander’s initial choosing of the site, and laying out the basics, and talks a little bit about the initial building. But past that, the book becomes almost entirely dedicated to the great minds that were at (or may have spent time at) the great library of Alexandria. So the bulk of the book is more of a who’s who of ancient philosophy. That still makes for good reading, but the authors are too enthusiastic, and make a number of statements that are problematic or error-prone.

The most startling mistake is a statement that the Julian calendar (correctly identified as being borrowed from Eratosthenes) is accurate to one day in 1,461 years. If that were true, there’d hardly be any need for the Gregorian calendar, as they’d only differ by a day or so, instead of 13 days. They also imply (in the Eratosthenes chapter again) that Columbus would have trouble convincing the King of Spain that the world was round, when the real trouble was convincing the court that he could make it, as the distance was too great for any amount of carried supplies (a conclusion that Columbus would have come to if he’d used Eratosthenes’ figure for the size of the Earth, instead of a much smaller estimate).

On the other hand, there’s an interesting note that an early draft of Copernicus’ De revolutionibus references Aristarchus’ heliocentric theory. Presumably they’re referring to the Commentariolus, and it’s an interesting connection that I hadn’t heard about before. (Though looking it up on Wikipedia shows that the authors perpetuate a translation-induced misconception of Aristarchus’ theory being considered impious at the time.)

This is a lighter, less technical, book than I was expecting, and for the lighter side of non-fiction, fairly well written… as long as you remember some of the wider-ranging pronouncements are problematic.